Behind the Screens: Faye Ginsburg

by Damien Stankiewicz

Welcome to the second post of the Visual and New Media Review’s video blog, Behind the Screens. This blog shines light on how anthropologists are exploring the production, circulation, and reception of media (and, often, two or all of these at once). It seeks to highlight the ways in which anthropologists are challenging media studies paradigms from which people often seem to be absent and to clarify the key arguments and interventions that anthropologists offer the study of media, especially as they push against received wisdom and popular assumptions. In a world seemingly saturated by screens and by truisms about a “mediated world” or the “age of the Internet,” this blog profiles social scientists who are advancing our understandings of how media technologies come to inflect, and are also given meaning by, situated cultural norms and practices.

Behind the Screens intends to be as accessible and clearly organized as possible to facilitate—in the spirit, perhaps, of the digital revolution—users’ ability to find the content most relevant to their own interests. Each video blog entry features the following four chapters:

An introduction of the scholar and her or his latest project.

The scholar’s response to the question, “What does your ethnography help us to understand about social realities behind the screens?”

The scholar’s discussion of three or four key interventions advanced in her or his work.

A discussion of “(field)work to be done,” in which the scholar talks about what she or he sees on the horizons of media research.

For our first interview, I spoke with Jenna Burrell about her book, Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana (MIT Press, 2012). In this installment, I interview renowned anthropologist of media Faye Ginsburg. We discuss Ginsburg’s expansive ethngraphic engagements with the abortion debate, indigenous media, disability studies and media, and more.